The Correlation of Reality

THE MEETING OF EAST AND WEST: AN INQUIRY CONCERNING WORLD UNDERSTANDING (531 pp.)--F.S.C. Northrop--Macmillan ($6).

Professor Northrop, Master of Yale's Silliman College, is a man who has something important to say. What he has to say embraces so many facts with such assurance, and is so radical and so constructive, that his book may well influence history, as he seriously proposes that it should.

Written by a philosopher, it is readable by any layman who likes to see a tough problem figured out step by step without shirking--a method which the author uses to create a good deal of intellectual suspense. The book arrives at a philosophical basis for world culture. If the world wants one, as down to earth as Marxism but with more than just economic satisfactions, Professor Northrop suggests that the world can have it.

Scientific Succession. Every culture in the past, says Northrop, has had a philosophical basis (a theory of the nature of man and what is good for him). Setting out to prove it in 435 pages of closely reasoned analyses of the histories of Mexico, the U.S., Britain, Germany, Russia and the Orient, Professor Northrop concentrates on science, religion and art, but ranges all over the cultural map. One of his basic theses is that the present forms of all Western cultures belong to the past because the assumptions behind them no longer square with scientific and hence philosophical truth. Indeed, they never did; Northrop says that the last system of thought that accounted coherently for all the facts of science known at the time was the Aristotelian system of St. Thomas Aquinas (circa 1300 A.D.).

Since the discoveries of Galileo and Newton, Western societies have been based on a succession of scientific philosophies, each of which added its own mistakes in correcting its predecessors. Finally science itself took a turn, with the physics of Einstein, that knocked the props from under even the inadequate philosophies of Locke, Kant and Hegel. Says Northrop: "The traditional modern world is as outmoded as the medieval world."

It is worse than that, he adds. With no philosophical coherence at the top, faulty and contradictory Western ideologies have been at war, like the societies that cling to them. Professor Northrop wants to find a worldwide philosophical formula that will synthesize the best of East and West. He does not believe the answer lies in the West going off the deep end into the mysticism of the East (as Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and other Anglo-American intellectuals seem to have done). Nor does he believe that the East should drop its own culture for Westernisms.

Method & Error. Professor Northrop, who teaches the philosophy of science at Yale, will not abide condemnation of science as such. "Nothing," he says, "can do more harm to democracy than the thesis, so popular with many contemporary moral and religious leaders, that science is neutral, if not positively evil, with respect to human values. . . ."

Scientific method is all right, the glory of the West; but the "modern" views of the world constructed on it were flawed by a basic error. Northrop is not alone in finding this error in John Locke, whose 17th Century philosophy contained the premises of Jeffersonian democracy, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The error consisted in the theory that "physical substances" (space, planets, flowers) are definable only in Newtonian terms (extension, mass, volume), thus have no sensuous qualities (depth, heat, fragrance) but are supplied with them by the "mental substance" of the observer.

With this "three-termed relation" as the villain of the piece, philosophy has been in trouble for nearly 300 years.

For anyone who thinks this metaphysical formula has nothing to do with the price of eggs, Professor Northrop cites chapter & verse. As a consequence of it, he argues, Locke saw no purpose in government except the protection of private property; and in consequence of that, the U.S. Government has failed to this day to understand the Mexican and other foreign governments. As another consequence, Protestant Christianity conceived the human soul differently from Catholic Christianity, in consequence of which Protestantism shared the poverty and confusion of "modern" cultures as Catholicism did not. As a further consequence, Western eggs and everything else have been priced on the hypothesis of the "free market" except when the hypothesis became unbearable.

Stark Realism. Locke's philosophy was elaborated and to some extent corrected by the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Hegel followed Kant, and Marx followed Hegel. One secret of the "arrogance" displayed by Germany and later by Communist Russia toward Britain and the U.S., Northrop observes, has been their assurance that their philosophical foundations were more modern and hence superior.

Professor Northrop's analysis of Russia faces the fact of Communist success: of the deliberate, swift and powerful application of a philosophy, Marx's, in human history. The Marxian dialectic was too rigid for the facts. But at least "it was high time that economic and political theory . . . treated man as a creature with a body, having continuous energy requirements in the form of food to maintain even his human existence. . . ."

Moreover: "The leaders of communistic Russia thoroughly understand the . . . philosophy . . . which underlies the traditional French and Anglo-American democracies. Knowing this, they are in a position to predict roughly how, in a given set of circumstances, we will act. . . ." He suggests that the "rest of us" acquire "a similar realism grounded in a philosophical, economic and political theory which defines what we stand for."

Professor Northrop finds hopeful sources of such a realism already flowing together in America. They include: 1) a search for coherence like that which has led the University of Chicago's Hutchins and other educators to the "medieval synthesis" of St. Thomas, in which the Lockean error was unknown; 2) a corrected, pragmatic view of precisely what is implied in scientific method, such as that developed by William James, John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead; 3) a realization, such as Latin American cultures have, of the profound reality of sensuous, emotional and artistic experience.

Theological Revolution. Professor Northrop shows how Aristotle's scientific and self-consistent thought, merged with Christian teaching in the 13th Century, provided "interconnections" between all departments of knowledge--something which the Humpty Dumpty modern world has desperately needed. This, he believes, is the present appeal of Thomism (philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas). But he values more the fact that in its day it was a great revolution in theology.

Plato and St. Augustine, for whom the world of sense was almost as unreal as it later was for Locke, were superseded in St. Thomas' system by Aristotle, biologist and logician, who knew it was and is real. Such a revolution, in present Western philosophy, is very near to what Professor Northrop wants. And he thinks that Roman Catholic thought, honoring reason and concrete reality, may achieve in time a new synthesis based on the new science.

Limitation of Theory. Professor Northrop believes that this periodic need for reconstructing philosophical theory is a peculiarity of Western culture. It is so because the West has concentrated on one method of knowing the world: scientific theory followed by "verification." But all verification is partial at best.

"The mere fact that [a] proposed theory is confirmed factually in every one of its deductive consequences does not establish . . . that it is the only theory which can meet this test. Thus it may very well be the case--and history has in fact often shown it to be the case--that some other theory will also take care of all the known evidence. Furthermore, there is nothing in the method to guarantee that tomorrow some new facts may not arise, with which the proposed theory, when developed logically. . . is incompatible. This also Western history has demonstrated again and again. . . .

"These characteristics . . . have exceedingly important moral and social implications. They mean that no Westerner is ever entitled to be cocksure about that portion of his moral, religious and social ideals which refers to or derives its justification from unseen, inferred factors not given with immediacy."

Reality of Experience. In what is "given with immediacy" Professor Northrop insists that mankind possesses riches and certainties to which the theorizing West has scarcely begun to wake up. But Einstein and recent philosophic thought indicate that the waking is at hand.

In all knowledge there are not three terms, as Locke thought, but two; Northrop calls them the esthetic (e.g., a book in your hand) and the theoretical (e.g., your inferences about its writer). "The nature of things, including both the observer and the observed, is composed of two factors or components, the one given immediately and purely empirically with certainty; the other having existence known with equal certainty, but known as to its specific formal . . . content only hypothetically. . . ."

What Northrop calls the esthetic component is what Western artists have sometimes called the sense of life. It is existence appreciated. It is what we know of life by seeing and feeling, by intuition, not by reasoning.

To know this, Professor Northrop says, is the wisdom of the Orient; and in the great religions of the East, most purely in Buddhism, it has been cultivated through thousands of years as the ultimate reality. In the West, even artists were rarely content to render the sensuous world--the esthetic component--for its own sake until 19th Century Impressionism. Yet if all devotees of the theoretic component--Anglo-Americans in particular--can learn the religious value of direct experience, fanaticism and confusion would cease.

This would mean, for one thing, that the arts would gain greater importance than the West has ever given them. Professor Northrop holds that the sensuous and passionate art of Mexico's Orozco, the sensuous and tranquil art of Georgia O'Keeffe, are essential insights into the nature of things--as are Chinese paintings.

Conclusion & Criticism. Professor Northrop's concluding chapters, describing the culture of Asia, argue lucidly for the soundness of its basic values and their availability to the West. A reciprocal exchange is now possible, he claims.

Professor Northrop has a characteristically heavy-footed phrase for what is needed. He thinks East and West can get together by a "two-termed epistemic correlation" between the esthetic and theoretical components of reality.

The West, with its theoretical knowledge (of ions, electromagnetic fields, atoms that are never seen, but "verified" by flashes, explosions, etc. which are), has much to offer the East, once the error of the West's philosophic ways since Locke is corrected. The West knows, for example, the science of the soil. The East, with its intuitive, contemplative knowledge of mother earth knows a lot that has no place in the West's scientific structure, and thereby finds the West's systematizing barren of much delight and wisdom. It is Professor Northrop's ambitious aim to try to "correlate" the esthetic and the theoretical into a philosophical ideal that will do for all civilization the world over.

In a New York Times review which managed at the same time to be patronizing and effusive, Harvard's Professor Howard Mumford Jones greeted this book as "the most important intellectual event in the United States thus far in 1946." Reviewers may well babble at its scope and the incisive quality of its thinking. Serious criticism of it among professional thinkers will perhaps center on Northrop's neglect of philosophies of history. Theologians will scarcely admit some of his religious ideas nor the primacy he gives to philosophy as such. Laymen may well balk at the pedagogical jabberwocky. But Northrop's work is the kind of sustained and fresh effort by which many minds and imaginations may be touched.

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